One of these guys has already taken 7 hit points of damage. Now if I can just remember which one…

I’ve run lots and lots of games where I’ve tracked the individual hit points of every orc on the battle map. Every GM comes up with their own clever methods of remembering which figure took what damage, but in the end it’s a lot of work for little benefit, and it just gets worse the more critters you add and the later at night the game goes.

A simple alternative is the hit point pile: track the total damage done to similar creatures as one big pile. Ignore which particular creature was hit. Just keep adding up the damage, and when the total is enough to kill one, the one that just got hit dies. Set the pile to zero and start over again (excess damage is lost).

There are twenty gnolls and each has 13 hit points. Fred attacks one for 7 damage, then Charlie attacks a different one for 4 damage — that’s 11 damage on the pile so far. Next Anastasia attacks a third gnoll for 6 damage, which kills it even though it had never been attacked before. The GM knocks over the figure Anastasia attacked and sets the damage pile back to 0. Nineteen gnolls to go.

If you have different groups of creatures use separate piles for each one (one pile for the goblins, one for the wolves). For unique creatures or very small groups just track hit points the normal way.

Pig Pile

Because damage is concentrated on a single enemy at a time, opponents die faster when you use hit point piles.

This is less of an issue than it seems, because smart players already tend to gang up on one opponent until it is dead instead of wounding a bunch of different enemies that could still fight back. It’s logical, but unfortunately it smells lame – in the real world a bunch of knights don’t surround one enemy on the battlefield at a time, but without facing rules to penalize you it’s often the smartest choice in d20.

Hit point piles give the players the benefit of ganging up on one guy without embarrassing themselves by actually doing it. Tactical benefit + aesthetically pleasing.

Two Piles Are Better Than One

There are a few potential pitfalls of in-game logic and metagaming:

- An unlucky character could keep hitting the same opponent over and over and again but never take them out because someone else keeps getting a killing blow.

- A lowly court jester can take a stab at a theoretically “fresh” enemy and kill him if other characters have already done damage elsewhere (this only seems strange when you think in terms of hit points, not a real fight).

- If your players are tactical metagamers they may try to do things like have a weak attacker go when they think the total is almost enough for a kill so that a stronger attacker doesn’t waste damage on an “overkill,” but if your players are that motivated to track this kind of thing a simplified system is probably not for you anyway.

The solution? Run two piles at a time instead of one. Decide which of the two piles to add the latest attack to as you prefer (or just alternate) and don’t tell the players. Does it seem like Fred has been beating on that gnoll for a while? Add his attack to the most damaged pile. Did a hobbit just kick someone in the shins? Add it to the undamaged pile, not the pile that’s an inch from death.

Running two or even three piles is still simple and fast, and certainly less overhead than tracking individual hit points for each critter.

I’ve been playing a lot of 4ed lately. I read this post and started thinking about healing surges and the “bloodied” state and it gave me a wonderful idea. Instead of tracking a pile until death, track it in 1/4 HP. Once the pile hits 1/4 HP of an enemy, reset the pile to zero and place some sort of a wound token next to the enemy on the map. The fourth wound token on an enemy drops it.

In this way you add a little granularity to the pile so players can spread damage around. It also provides a visual element to the table so players can gauge how injured an opponent looks. This also resolves the AoE issues, because you can place wound tokens on enemies inside the target area.

I might try it… however my current system (21st century hightech method) is having a spreadsheet on my laptop. It is not as hard as one might think – I would say 9.5 times out of 10 I am able to pin point which baddie has how many hitpoints by keeping notes in the cells next to the HP total.

I ran several high numbered battles… the last one I would say had between 45 and 55 (4 to 6 HD) bad guys with 3 super-villans (lvl 10 & 12) pitted against a party of 5 x 10th level PCs & 1 x 12th lvl NPC.

One pitfall I see with the stacks is high level players that go for the Improved Cleaving characters… it renders that feat almost useless as it is very unlikely you will down more than one baddie in a round.

A good cleaving PC will come in, try to engage 3 or more targets – hit them all at least once and then on round 5 go for the cleave all around him with his power attack/ impr. cleave.

Stacking renders this tactic almost unplayable.

Also there is area affect spells. I see several issues with that as a high level mage can scorch easily for 400 points of damage with one fireball (8d6 (avg = 24) x 10 targets = avg of 240 HP of damage combined). If your threashold is 100 HP, the fireball will fall 4 targets and leave 6 ‘unscathed’.

I know fighters would much rather fight 10 half wounded bad guys than 6 ‘healthy’.

System is not perfect, but it sounds useful for random encounters and lower level fights.

The outcome of my last big battle was a victory for the PCs, but at great cost. They rescued the general but their 3 big fighters, a Samurai, a barbarian and Heroic fighter all fell. The party is left with a bard, sorcerer and a Rapier bearing fighter.

Clever idea, I like it. Especially with the two piles variant – it keeps players guessing. Even better, it makes it look like the monsters don’t all have the same hit points. It works just as if you had been individually rolling their hit dice.

Now, a question: how do you handle area spells ? I guess you need to add damage to the pile for each enemy that gets hurt.

” in the real world a bunch of knights don’t surround one enemy on the battlefield at a time”

Well the real problem here is the hit point system in general. In the real world if I get hit by a sword just one time, I’m on the ground. And that’s usually how it works in Call of Cthulhu, but it’s just not as fun when you’re on the receiving end!

I like this idea, it makes me want to run a big group against my 6 3rd level players, perhaps 3 groups of 10 kobolds or something. Anything that makes me want to run combat differently (and easily, smoothly) is a great thing. Thanks for another great idea.

The wasted damage is an interesting thought… though only for the Power Attackers, and I suppose they waste a lot of damage anyway.

The “pig pile” reminds me of ye olde Tunnels & Trolls — which was some fast combat, in a mostly good way.

I use minis with small ‘dot’ (round) stickers on the top or bottom of the base, with a color and number (red 1-9, yellow 1-9, blue 1-9, &tc.)

I have a grid for each encounter with each mini’s color/number, [now going d20 specific] static areas for AC (and Touch AC, Flatfooted AC) and to hit/damage … then a larger area for hit points.

It’s easy for players to say “I target the orc near so-and-so, Yellow #2, with my Scorching Ray”. And easy for me to track. I consider the gridding part of my prep time (I usually count on two to four hours of prep for every hour of gameplay).

My initial reaction to the idea is that I’m a bit… skeptical, but the more I think about it, the more I like it.

What about making one “pile” for each player. Prevents a scenario like the one you describe (unlucky player who keeps getting his kill ganked) and also prevents players from gaming the system. It does have an issue where if, say, 5 players all attack the same critter, it might very well still be standing, but I think that’s enough of a corner case that it’s not a big deal… Just one of the consequences of the abstraction, and each technique has unique ones.

Incidentally, my usual way of keep track of HP of mobs is either mook rules (for extremely low-level people, horde of level 1 pirates vs. APL 8 party for example), where any damage autokills, or if I actually do need to keep track of HP I stick a die or two next to the mini in question.

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